This is a very clever, well-made online video for the Dollar Shave Club that today went viral, mainly thanks to the Reddit community. Now if you’re a business owner, especially a startup, you may be wishing that your triumphant video – you know the one that you spent way too much money on and has only generated a handful of views – went viral as well. Afterall, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But going viral does have one or two downsides that you need to be ready for.

Surviving the Flood

You can never control how or when you go viral. Once you release your campaign you immediately lose control over it, so you need to be ready. As, the folks at the Dollar Shave Club discovered going viral can very quickly bring your servers to their knees. So, while their video has generated a huge amount of interest in their target market they can’t capitalise on it because their site is either down or monumentally slow. If this were to happen to you would your server survive?

Is it optimised for high-levels of traffic?

Do you have backup servers ready to go at a moment’s notice?

Is it automated?

What are your contingencies if everything goes pear-shaped?

You need to take all these issues into consideration during the planning stages of your campaign.

Success Kills

If you’re used to servicing one-hundred clients per month and your video brings in another ten thousand you may be thinking it’s champagne and caviar time. But servicing a hundred-fold increase in business may drive you to the wall.

Do you have the necessary inventory?

How long will it take for your suppliers to fill that order?

Can you obtain the necessary funds?

What do you do if something goes wrong?

Going viral should never be a strategy, it is an outcome, but you need to be prepared for it. Detailed planning for every stage of the campaign needs to identified, costed and implemented. Going viral is not an automatic road to riches. It needs to be carefully managed and controlled. Are you ready to go viral?

As part of the beta test for Perth-based startup, Floq, I’ve created the Digital Media Social Marketing Survey. I am hoping that the information will provide me with a better understanding of a whole range of businesses in different industries.

The survey should take only 5 minutes or so to complete.

All information will remain confidential.

As Floq is still in beta please contact me if you encounter any problems.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with Brendon from The Kill Devil Hills a few days ago and thought I’d share this great track from their albumn The Drought. This music really feels really rich and very Australian to me. It’s deep and mature like the red earth of the centre of our great land.

The Kill Devil Hills are a legendary band in Fremantle, their home town, and for good reason. They’re awesome!

We enter the weekend with this charming little video set in 2062. How will you remember digital media and social networking in fifty years time? Will you remember anything in 50 years? =) Tell us what your highlights are from now and what you feel the world of 2062 will be like.

Do you feel your employees spend too much time on Facebook? Are long lunch breaks the norm at your workplace? Desktime have created an interesting infographic showing work habits based on a study of over one million work hours.

Of particular interest is that average workers spend 12% of their work day in social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is called unproductive by the graphic but is it really? Is getting intimate with the tools of social media really unproductive, or is it an untapped resource? By adopting an organisation-wide social media strategy has some genuine benefits.

Even if you don’t wish to empower your entire workforce, you can identify and selectively upskill members. The mechanics of administrating a Facebook Page or twitter account for a hobby and for a workplace are very similar. Someone who is managing a hobby or personal page can more readily be used as a backup for your workplace page.

Also by offering your staff an opportunity to use the social media tools at their workplace you also gain additional monitoring and networking resources. For instance participating in Linkedin can allow your workforce to network with others in your industry, locally and globally, as well as suppliers and also help identify prospects. Similarly, news and trends often break in near real time on Twitter. Such intelligence can be invaluable to gain and maintain competitive advantage.

While using social media at work can be seen as unproductive it can also offer new opportunities for both your staff and your organisation. However, it needs guidance and your workers need to be trained, trusted and empowered if you are to fully receive the benefits.

Can you copyright two stripes on a sweater? How about a China-red soled shoe? Marcia Horowitiz provides some practical advice on how to deal with a range of IP protection issues.

Key Components of an IP Crisis Communications Program:

Identifying trouble spots and key themes

Forming crisis teams

Implementing a corporate press policy

Designing a warning system

Creating a crisis manual

These key points are not only relevant to IP asset issues, but also to social marketing and digital media crisis as well. It is important to be prepared and plan for contingencies now, not when the crisis happens.

Yesterday I posted a link to this excellent interactive site. Unfortunately, some people were unable to get it to work and so I have now created a video demonstrating the site. It’s a very clever piece of web advertising.

BTW Julia, you can all the Federal Police off. It’s just a bit of fun =)

This video is an analytical model based on the GPS data from ten thousand taxi trips over the course of 24 hours. Using the Google Maps API the creators, Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan F Saldarriaga, were able to create a pretty awesome visulisation based on the taxi traffic as it moved around Manhattan.

Just in time for Valentines Day, Hotels.com have released an interesting infographic based on a survey to identify what people considered to be their ideal romantic weekend. What I found particularly intriguing is that exploring a new city was so popular amongst the 18-29 age range, whereas spending a night in hotel scored so low in the same age range. For the Millenials it’s romance-is-on-the-go.